dementia care, cognitive decline

Veterans Day is a reminder of a well-recorded past. Watch aging veterans assemble in parks, read about Honor Flight – where veterans aged 83 to 100 are flown from across the country to Washington to visit the World War II and other memorials. Veterans Day is a moment in which the history and backgrounds of individuals are celebrated, speeches are given, flags are waved.  Sit next to veterans at one of these events and they will proudly tell you about the remembered past.  I wonder how many of them, though, have actually left a recorded (or video) version of that remembered past for family members?

Should video monitoring be required in small assisted living homes?  In recent Senate testimony, ALFA president Rick Grimes sounded a bit defensive about the regulatory oversight of assisted living facilities (ALFs) in Florida (aka 'group homes' in other states). Let's back up: Even when multiple residents died of abuse and neglect and inspections revealed multiple violations, the Agency for Health Care Administration didn’t close these troubled small homes down. Says Mr. Grimes: regulation in all fifty states (aka 50 different sets of regulations) is plenty adequate, and by the way, each state’s seniors are ‘different’ -- the Florida deaths were due to ‘management’ issues.

For wanderers and caregivers – another long-awaited device. Beware of pre-announcements. So GTX has announced that the long-awaited GPS shoe (let's call that 'footware') will be available in October (that’s now!) for $299, enabling a geo-fence to be set for the wearer, alerting when the shoe travels outside of the specified area. From the NY Times article, the argument for the GPS shoe came from Andrew Carle, the coiner of ‘Nana technology’ and a professor at George Mason University. He suggested the idea to Aetrex, the shoe manufacturer, which first announced that it was going to begin product testing in 2009.   I got pretty excited by that in 2009, but after placing a call every six months to learn that it was not available, I gave up.

Something different -- a positive study of aging and cognitive decline.  Last week in the midst of worse and most worse economic news, USA Today published the results of a decade-long study through Duke, Harvard and others that tracked 1049 older adults age aged 56-102 who at the beginning of the study showed no signs of dementia.  At the end of the study, two-thirds of the participants showed at most only “slow cognitive decline,” not the level of decline typically associated with requiring assistance or medical care. Why is this interesting? Remember the often-quoted statistic that nearly 50% of seniors aged 85+ suffer from Alzheimer’s? This study undermines that estimate and therefore the domino effect of the assumptions that are derived from it.